“Organising for social”: The integration of Brandwatch and HootSuite

As the social media landscape has evolved to include everyone from small independent retailers to multinational conglomerates, the plethora of campaign management tools available to businesses has spiraled exponentially.

Ultimately, businesses of all sizes should be seeking a streamlined, responsive and analytical approach to social media.

Great content is one thing but the inescapable buzzword is of course, engagement. Social media for business is all about the conversation, and therefore, a tool that tracks and analyses this kind of activity is essential. Better still is a tool which also enables businesses to be reactive in the social sphere. Brandwatch and HootSuite have attempted to deliver just that.

Brandwatch’s social monitoring capabilities can now be easily combined with the utility of HootSuite’s publishing power, and the analytics of both platforms can be used to inform strategy.

Having setup a search query in Brandwatch to identify conversations about a certain brand or product, the results can then be filtered, using a variety of metadata, leaving the user with only the most relevant and insightful leads.

This is all very well of course, but what to do next? Cue HootSuite. By adding the stream of data found by Brandwatch to a tab within HootSuite, reactive social media couldn’t be easier. With the ability to publish to all of the major social networks, entering into that all-important conversation is now a data-led and efficient process.

Furthermore, with customer service becoming increasingly social, and fans more likely to post their questions online before contacting a customer service department directly, Brandwatch and HootSuite’s integration could also be useful for managing a customer service team.

Search data can be filtered using custom rules according to its sentiment and virality, ranked in order of priority and individually assigned to a responder. The benefits of such a timely and effective response could be felt by businesses of all sizes, and of course, the same process can be used as a way of proactively acquiring sales.

The integration is a great step forward for two tools that are already powerful individually. Fortunately, it comes at no extra cost on top of the standard subscriptions (£500 per month for Brandwatch Pro and $9.99 per month for HootSuite Pro).

We are certainly looking forward to exploring the potential this could have for our clients. Which area do you think it could be most useful in?